Top 7 GoCardless alternatives in the UK for 2026

In this article

The strongest GoCardless alternatives for a UK business in 2026 are Adfin, London & Zurich, Access PaySuite, Stripe, Modulr, Bottomline and Kolleno. Which one fits you depends on whether you need cards as well as direct debit, whether you want chasing in the same place, and whether you already hold your own Bacs Service User Number. Several tools marketed as alternatives cannot collect direct debit at all.

Why businesses look for a GoCardless alternative

GoCardless does one thing well. It collects bank debit at 1% + 20p on its Standard plan, capped at £4, with no monthly fee, and its scale and brand are real advantages.

Three things usually send people looking for something else.

It collects bank debit only. There are no cards, so if you take card payments, Apple Pay or Google Pay, they live with a second provider. GoCardless states this plainly: "We are unable to collect payments via credit or debit cards".

Nothing chases your invoices either. Direct debit pulls on the due date, but nothing follows up an unpaid invoice, so most users add a separate chasing subscription. That subscription is usually the largest line in the stack, which is why the headline transaction rate doesn't tell you much about what you'll actually pay.

And the rate rises with the tier. Advanced is 1.25% + 20p capped at £5 and Pro is 1.4% + 20p capped at £5.60. Features you might consider basic, such as putting your own name on the payer's bank statement, are paid add-ons: name on statements is £50 a month and custom checkout £150 a month.

At a glance: GoCardless alternatives compared

All pricing as published and correct as of August 2026.

1. Adfin, for collection and chasing in one place

Full disclosure: Adfin publishes this article, so weigh our entry accordingly. We've linked every competitor's own pricing page and named the situations where each of them is the better choice.

Adfin is a UK payments platform that collects by direct debit, card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, open banking and bank transfer, then chases the unpaid invoices automatically.

What you get:

• One rate across methods: 1% + 20p per successful payment, capped at £4 for direct debit and bank payments
• Core credit control included at no cost, with enhanced credit control at 0.3% charged only when used
• Chasing over email, WhatsApp or SMS, sent from your own email domain
• Automatic reconciliation with two-way Xero and QuickBooks sync
• Free retries, with intelligent fallback to card if a direct debit fails
• Direct debit mandate captured at proposal signature through the Socket integration
• Migration via the Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process where enough mandates are moving, so your clients don't re-sign

The commercial detail:

• Pricing: 1% + 20p, capped at £4 on direct debit and bank payments. Premium and EEA cards +1%, non-EEA cards +2%. Direct debits over £2,000 carry an extra 0.15% on the amount above £2,000, where GoCardless charges 0.3% on the same basis. No monthly fees, no minimum and no contract; enterprise pricing is by agreement (see Adfin pricing).
• Who it suits: you're an accountancy practice or an SMB collecting recurring fees, and you want cards and chasing without a second subscription.
• Limitation: no multi-currency collection, so if you invoice in euros or dollars this probably isn't the right tool, and GoCardless or Stripe is likely to be the better answer. Adfin is also the youngest brand here, with no independent review base at the scale of the incumbents.

2. London & Zurich, the most small-firm-friendly

A long-established independent UK direct debit facilities-management provider, FCA authorised, firm reference 712747, with three decades in the market.

What you get:

• Shared Service User Number on the entry tier, so you can collect without bank sponsorship
• Branded SUN on the Business tier, putting your name on the payer's statement
• A separate bureau service for firms that hold their own SUN
• Xero and QuickBooks integrations, plus account validation and SMS
• Advance notifications handled for you on the entry tier
• A named human through implementation and training

The commercial detail:

• Pricing: indicative tiers only, with the exact rate quoted after a conversation. Foundation on a shared SUN at "around 1%", Business with a branded SUN "from 0.5% or 20p", and banded Enterprise pricing.
• Reviews: no substantial independent review base found on G2, Capterra or the Xero App Store.
• Who it suits: you're a one or two person firm with no SUN and you'd rather speak to a person. It has a dedicated accountancy page with TaxAssist Accountants and ICPA as named references.
• Limitation: the tier a small practice lands on is a percentage of collection value at around 1%, with no cap published, and that gets expensive on larger fee notes next to a capped or flat fee. Collection only, with no invoicing and no chasing engine.

3. Access PaySuite, formerly SmartDebit

The payments division of The Access Group, and the current home of SmartDebit, acquired in September 2021. FCA firm reference 730815 and a Bacs approved bureau.

What you get:

• Facilities-managed collection on their SUN, or submission on your own
• Cards and open banking alongside direct debit
• Branded advance notice letters and hosted mandate sign-up pages
• Automatic retries of failed payments
• Xero and Zapier integrations

The commercial detail:

• Pricing: from 8p per transaction for small and medium businesses with no setup fees, and custom pricing for enterprise. Their published worked example is 500 payments a month at £30 average value costing around £215 a month. Note their SmartDebit brand page quotes "from just 4p", contradicting the 8p figure, so get your rate confirmed in writing.
• Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 to 4.7 from 369 reviews as displayed on their own pages (user-reported).
• Who it suits: you want facilities-managed direct debit plus cards from one supplier inside a large software group.
• Limitation: no self-serve sign-up, every route is a quote, and the published SMB rate is a floor and not a rate card. No invoicing and no receivables chasing.

4. Stripe, if you are building something

What you get:

• More than 100 payment methods, from Bacs direct debit to cards and wallets
• The deepest developer tooling and documentation in the market
• Mature multi-currency with conversion from 0.5%
• Radar fraud machine learning and Smart Retries
• Invoicing with automated reminders

The commercial detail:

• Pricing: Bacs direct debit 1% capped at £4, UK cards 1.5% + 20p, invoicing 0.4% to 0.5% per paid invoice, Billing from 0.7% of volume or £450 a month.
• Reviews: Trustpilot around 1.8 (user-reported). Low scores are common across payment processors, where complaints cluster around account reviews and held funds more than the product itself.
• Who it suits: you have developer resource, a custom checkout, or a need for many payment methods and currencies.
• Limitation: it isn't turnkey. Costs stack across separate products, chasing is basic, automatic Bacs retries are still in preview, and reconciliation in Xero works cleanly only under a specific configuration.

5. Modulr, for flat fees and your own SUN

An FCA-authorised electronic money institution providing accounts and payments as well as collections, sold both as infrastructure to platforms and as packaged products to businesses.

What you get:

• Flat per-collection pricing instead of a percentage of value
• Your own SUN and your own name on the payer's statement
• Direct scheme access with real-time settlement
• Variable Recurring Payments with a funds check before collection
• You keep control of retry logic

The commercial detail:

• Pricing: the published plans are for outbound payments (Bronze £30 a month for 80 payments through to Platinum £500 for 3,000). Direct debit collection appears in no published plan and routes to a sales conversation.
• Who it suits: you're a growing business collecting high-value recurring amounts, where flat fees work out cheaper than a percentage and the payer seeing your name matters.
• Limitation: the Modulr you can buy off the page pays suppliers and staff, and it doesn't collect your fees. Collection is sales-led and assumes you'll hold your own SUN, so you're into bank sponsorship and ongoing work. Their accountants pricing page doesn't mention collections at all.

6. Bottomline, the deepest direct debit operation

A Bacs-approved software vendor and bureau, FCA registration 616279. Bottomline states it processes more than half of all UK direct debit and direct credit transactions.

What you get:

• Facilities-managed collection with no SUN required, or your own SUN registered to your company
• Automated exception handling by failure code, with automatic re-presentation where the mandate is live
• Automatic alternative payment links when a mandate has died
• Confirmation of Payee for Business at the point of mandate capture
• Advance notice by email from your own domain, or print and post

The commercial detail:

• Pricing: no published pricing, quote only.
• Who it suits: you're a mid-market or enterprise receivables team with an ERP or membership system behind you.
• Limitation: it isn't built for you to buy. No pricing, no self-serve, an implementation project, and a toolkit aimed at a receivables function a small practice doesn't have.

7. Kolleno, if chasing and collection must be one system

A London and New York order-to-cash platform covering collections, payments, cash application, credit risk and disputes.

What you get:

• Chasing by email, by SMS and by phone, with per-tier allowances
• Collection by direct debit, open banking and card through a white-label portal
• Automatic cash application and reconciliation
• Machine learning that surfaces a customer's preferred payment method
• Integrations across Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, NetSuite, Dynamics, SAP and Oracle

The commercial detail:

• Pricing: £650 per user per month on BusinessPay for businesses over £1m turnover, £1,245 per user on Business Plus, then custom. Their own footnote notes extra charges may apply for integrations and customisations.
• Reviews: G2 4.9 out of 5 from 109 reviews, Capterra 5.0 from 8, Xero App Store 5.0 from 18 (user-reported).
• Who it suits: you're a mid-market or enterprise finance team and you want the whole order-to-cash cycle in one platform.
• Limitation: per-user pricing puts it out of reach for a small firm. Three controllers on Business Plus approaches £3,700 a month before add-ons.

Tools sold as alternatives that cannot replace GoCardless

Most comparison pages mislead here, and it's where you can waste the most time.

• PayPal has no UK Bacs direct debit for merchants. Recurring runs on card or balance billing agreements, and the standard commercial rate is 2.9% + 30p.
• Chaser, Satago, Paidnice, Credit Hound and Trove chase invoices, some of them very well, but none publishes UK direct debit support. They replace a chasing tool, not GoCardless, so you'd still need a collection provider alongside.
• Crezco has never collected Bacs direct debit, and its recurring standing order links were switched off on 7 March 2025. Crezco is now an embedded payables product sold mainly to software platforms.
• AccessPay requires you to already hold your own bank-sponsored SUN, starts at £5,500 a year and takes up to twelve weeks to implement. AccessPay is treasury and Bacs submission infrastructure, not an SME collection service, and it's a different company from Access PaySuite despite the similar name.
• Nuapay is now GoCardless. The acquisition of Sentenial, trading as Nuapay, completed on 2 September 2024 and nuapay.com redirects to gocardless.com. Any list still offering it as an alternative is out of date.
• Debtor Daddy is no longer a UK option. It was acquired by CreditorWatch in October 2022, renamed CreditorWatch Collect in March 2023, and is now Australia-only.

Where GoCardless still wins

Switching isn't automatically the right move. Stay where you are if:

• You collect in euros or dollars. GoCardless handles multi-currency across more than 40 countries. Adfin doesn't collect in foreign currencies at all.
• Direct debit is genuinely all you need, you're on the Standard plan at 1% + 20p, and you're not paying for a separate chasing tool. There's no saving to chase.
• You want the largest dedicated bank debit brand. Scale and recognition have value, particularly if your customers see the provider name.
• You've got significant custom integration already built against their API.

Worth noting for balance: GoCardless holds a Trustpilot score of around 2.5 out of 5 (user-reported), with complaints clustering on account suspensions and held funds. That pattern is common across payment providers and isn't specific to them.

Switching away from GoCardless

Moving an existing mandate book away from GoCardless means a Bacs bulk change. In GoCardless's own documentation that requires a wet-signed deed with no e-signatures accepted, written notice to your customers and four to six weeks. Their documentation also says payments and subscriptions do not transfer, so you set those up again.

The way to approach a switch is to work through this before you start:

• Count your mandates. On a large book the bulk change route usually makes sense; on a small one it's often faster to have customers sign a new mandate and skip the Bacs timeline entirely. Ask your incoming provider where their threshold sits, because no Bacs document publishes one.
• List your payment schedules. These don't carry across in a bulk change, so map every recurring amount and date before you move.
• Check your notice obligations. Customers need telling before anything is debited, and at least three working days' notice is standard.
• Plan the overlap. Collect with your existing provider up to shortly before the change date, and with the new one shortly after, so nothing is missed.
• Ask who does the paperwork. With Adfin, we handle the forms, the secure data transfer and the customer notification emails, sent in your branding.

With Adfin, where enough mandates are moving the Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process moves them and your clients don't re-sign. Under 50, clients sign a new mandate. Adfin runs bulk changes from GoCardless regularly, so it's a well-used route rather than a theoretical one.

How to choose

How we chose these tools

Every provider here was assessed against its own published pricing and documentation, accessed in August 2026, with each figure linked so you can check it. Where a provider doesn't publish pricing, we say so instead of estimating. Review scores are third-party (G2, Capterra, the Xero App Store and Trustpilot) with the review count included, and are labelled user-reported. We excluded tools that cannot collect UK direct debit from the main list and explained why, and we included the situations where each provider, including GoCardless, is the better choice than Adfin.

Adfin publishes this article and is one of the providers compared. No independent UK ranking of these tools exists, and the comparison pages that rank highest are almost all published by one of the vendors, so it's worth checking the vendors' own pricing pages yourself.

See how the whole stack compares on cost. Book a demo or see Adfin pricing.

Common questions

Which GoCardless alternative is cheapest? On headline direct debit rate, Adfin matches GoCardless Standard at 1% + 20p capped at £4, and Access PaySuite starts lower at 8p per transaction on a quote. The larger saving usually comes from not paying a separate chasing subscription, and that subscription typically costs more than the transaction difference.

Does any GoCardless alternative include invoice chasing? Adfin includes core credit control at no extra cost, and Kolleno includes full chasing at enterprise pricing. Chaser, Satago, Credit Hound and Paidnice chase but do not collect direct debit, so they work alongside a collection provider instead of replacing one.

Do my customers have to re-sign their direct debit if I leave GoCardless? Not on the bulk change route, because that uses the Bacs Direct Debit Bulk Change Process. Below the threshold your provider sets, customers sign a new mandate, and that's faster because it avoids the Bacs waiting period. Note that GoCardless's own guidance says payment schedules do not transfer in a bulk change and must be recreated.

Can I collect direct debit without my own Service User Number? Yes. Adfin, London & Zurich, Access PaySuite and Bottomline can all collect without you holding a SUN. Modulr and AccessPay expect you to have your own.

Does GoCardless take card payments? No. It collects bank debit only, so cards, Apple Pay and open banking need a second provider, or a platform that covers both.

Sources

• Access PaySuite — direct debit pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• AccessPay — Bacs approved software (accurate as of August 2026)
• Bottomline — UK direct debit (accurate as of August 2026)
• Crezco — support FAQs (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — cards are not collected (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — moving mandates away from GoCardless (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Kolleno — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• London & Zurich — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Modulr — pricing for business (accurate as of August 2026)
• PayPal — UK business fees (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — UK pricing (accurate as of August 2026)

Adfin is one of the providers compared in this article. All competitor pricing is the provider's own published pricing, correct as of August 2026; providers change their prices, so check before you commit. Review scores are third-party and were accurate at the time of writing. Last updated August 2026.